"Little Children, Keep Yourselves from Idols." 1 John 5:21 Part 5

This is the fifth segment of my sermon on 1 John 5:21, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols," delivered to Friendship Baptist Church in Mondovi, WI, on 8/9/09.

D. Wait a minute... some of those later ones especially are good things? Are you saying we shouldn't want justice, or family, or a good education, or romance or beauty? Those are good things. Shouldn't we want those things? Shouldn't we pursue them and even sometimes sacrifice to get them?

1. When any good thing, becomes a god thing, then it's a bad thing.

-If any of these good things becomes ultimate for you, then it begins to want to call all the shots in your life. It begins to want to make everything else bow down to it. You'll have to sacrifice to it everything else. What do you sacrifice for?

-The best things often make the worst and hardest idols to dislodge from our hearts. For instance, the idol of self-righteousness that the Pharisees had. The better the idol, the less obvious that its destroying you, the more subtle its deadly grip on you.

2. You become like what you worship. As the Psalm says, "They who worship idols will become like them." They may be good things, but you don't want to become them. If you worship silver, you'll become cold and hard. If you worship success, you will devour your children like Cronos. If you worship freedom, you will become chaos, and your life will grow more and more out of control. If you worship technology, you will become a tool to be used by a capitalist economy. If you worship business, you will be come a ledger, losing the ability to give freely, losing the ability to be personal, everything will be business to you. If you worship mirth and a good time, you will become a wastrel and a drunkard for pleasure, you will eventually lose the capacity for gravity, for solid labor. If you worship romance or beauty, you will be nothing more or deeper than a pretty face, or a half-goat pleasure seeker. If you worship knowledge or skills, then you will eventually trap yourself in your own mind and your sense of your own worth, losing the ability to truly connect with people. If you worship the battle of ideas, then there will be nothing for you but fighting and bickering. If you worship marriage and family, parenting, then you will drown your spouse and children in your expectations for them, you will crush them with your need to be the perfect spouse or parent. In short, if you worship these gods, you will end up destroying yourself.